Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence

July 02, 2019

I bought a book written by Sam Harris' wife, Annaka Harris, because the title appealed to me (Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of Mind), and I wanted to see if she'd disagree with her husband -- a noted atheist neuroscientist whose Waking Up guided meditations I listen to every morning via an iPhone app.

As I suspected, this little (110 pages) book didn't contain much that I didn't already know. But Harris did discuss consciousness in an appealing fashion, and had an interesting take on the possibility of panpsychism.

Here's how she distinguishes between prescientific notions of all matter being imbued with consciousness in some sense, and modern versions of panpsychism.

Some versions of panpsychism describe consciousness as separate from matter and composed of some other substance, a definition reminiscent of vitalism and traditional religious descriptions of a soul.

But while the term has been used to describe a wide range of thinking throughout history, contemporary considerations of panpsychism provide descriptions of reality very different from the earlier versions -- and are unenumbered by any religious beliefs.

One branch of modern panpsychism proposes that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing, even inanimate forms such as technological devices; another goes so far as to suggest that consciousness stands alongside the other fundamental forces and fields that physics has revealed to us -- like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces

Harris prefers the second idea, that consciousness is fundamental to matter. This is a simpler concept than assuming that consciousness emerges at a certain stage of complexity in information processing.

After all, I find it hard to accept that the thermostats in our house are conscious, even though they do process information about the temperature in our home, comparing it to the temperature we desire, and "acting" accordingly. It's a bit easier for me to envision that my iPhone is conscious, though this also is a big leap of faith.

The main problem with studying consciousness is the definition Harris uses, which is founded on Thomas Nagel's famous paper, "What is it like to be a bat?"

An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.

Now, obviously this doesn't entail a self, soul, or such. All that's required to be a member of the Conscious Club is there being something that it is like to be you. Or me. Or anybody. Or anything.

Because we humans have a finely honed sense of what it is like to be ourselves, and love to describe that sense in words, music, poetry, and so many other ways, we reasonably assume that our fellow Homo sapiens also are conscious. However, there's no way that we can be sure of this, since there is no way any conscious being can know what it is like to be another conscious being.

(Thankfully, really. My wife and I have been married for 29 years. We're still learning about each other, which makes life interesting, given that neither of us has access to the other person's subjective side.)

This makes consciousness seem mysterious, even though it also is the most obvious and familiar thing we know, given that all of our experience, every bit of it, is known by consciousness. A robot could be programmed to answer "Yes" if asked the question, "Are you conscious?" Yet this wouldn't prove it was conscious.

Thus consciousness has to be inferred in every being other than the entity that directly knows what it is like to be what it is.

I'm virtually 100% certain that our dogs are conscious. Ditto for the squirrels, deer, coyotes, raccoons, and other creatures that inhabit our neighborhood. In fact, I can envision almost every living thing being at least minimally conscious, even a starfish or an ant.

As Annaka Harris notes, the problem arises when we try to establish a firm dividing line between conscious living beings and unconscious living beings. Plants respond to stimuli and have an awareness of their surroundings. Is the oak tree in our yard conscious?

Maybe. But since I can't fathom what it like to be a bat, in no way could I even begin to fathom what is like to be a tree, assuming there is anything it is like to be a tree.

Rocks and other inanimate objects almost certainly lack consciousness in the What is like to be.. sense. Yet they are composed of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of nature. How are they able to do this? Or, does that question even make sense? It does if panpsychism is accepted.

Near the end of her book, Harris writes:

It's important to clarify a few points regarding the distinction I continue to draw between two categories of questions -- those pertaining to how deep in the universe consciousness runs and those about the brain processes that give rise to our human experiences - along with the value I place on each of them.

First, although I'm defending panpsychism as a legitimate category of theories about consciousness based on what we currently know, I am not closed to the possibility that we might discover, by some future scientific method, that consciousness does in fact exist only in brains.

It's hard for me to see how we could ever arrive at this understanding with any certainty, but I don't rule it out. Nor am I discounting the possibility that consciousness is something we will never fully grasp.

Those are pleasingly open-minded sentiments. I just wish religiously-minded people had the same uncertain attitude.

May 10, 2019

Here's another comment from David C. Lane on a recent post of mine that makes so much sense, I'm sharing it even before I've even lunch. Sometimes my hunger for transmitting truth is greater than my stomach's yearning for food.

Lane talks about his Remainder Conjecture in which supernatural claims should only be accepted after a rigorous examination of them through the lens of science.

This fits with David Hume's observation, which I wrote about yesterday, that we have a tremendous amount of evidence for the physical laws of nature, and extremely little evidence for any possible supernatural phenomena.

So any claim, for example, that someone was able to use ESP to predict a future event, or perform a miracle that violated the laws of nature, has to be viewed extremely skeptically absent very convincing evidence that the supernatural event actually occurred.

After all, we humans are mistaken all the time about what happens in our minds. We accept illusions as fact. We conjure up stories that fit with our desires and sense of self. We forget things. We lie to others and sometimes to ourselves.

Science generally wants to know how something happened, though this is less important when accurate predictions can be made about what is happening. For example, the basics of genetic inheritance were understood before DNA was discovered. And quantum physics is marvelously successful without understanding what exactly is going on at the quantum level.

But if someone makes a claim about having experienced a supernatural phenomenon, we need to ask how that happened. What in the human brain is able to contact a supposed supernatural realm? Of if that capacity isn't in the brain, then where is it? In an immaterial soul? OK, if that's hypothesized, then where is the evidence for soul?

Below Lane's comment I've shared an excerpt from an essay he shared in another recent comment, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." The basic message of the essay is that our consciousness doesn't reflect reality as it is, but as our mind makes it out to be.

Enjoy. I really like Lane's contention that those who view paranormal phenomena as being real should welcome each and every explanation for those phenomena that utilizes the normal.

Spence,

The movie the "remainder conjecture" is to actually open up a blind spot, not hide one.

For instance, if we exhaust physical explanations first (for instance, trying to understand the neural correlate theory of consciousness) and we find after intensive and comprehensive research that it is insufficient to the task, then it opens up a window, what I call a "remainder", which gives us suggestive indications that something ELSE is needed beyond the physical parameters we explored.

So, ironically, those most in favor of the paranormal should be at the forefront of exhausting each and every explanation that utilizes the normal.

This in itself doesn't discount the supernatural in the least, but means that we won't be duped into confusing a purely physical event for a psychic one, which has too often happened in the past.

Science actually starts with ignorance since it doesn't assume (theologically or prematurely) to have any absolute answers and thus from this state then proposes guesses and models and then tests those to see which one best fits the situation and which one provides the greatest predictive value.

Therefore, science is always doubting, always questioning, and in so doing has been wonderfully progressive in terms of understanding that which before was misunderstood.

Also, what used to be seen as magical or mysterious or produced by a god, has often turned out to be generated by physical means. The sun and nuclear fusion (see Hans Bethe for more) is a good illustration of this.

Same with the idea of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity made predictions that could be tested.

However, some things like "gravitational waves" were so subtle that it took a 100 years for us to detect them, which was a great breakthrough that just came to light.

The same, of course, with the subatomic physics when physicists knew that there was a missing piece in the Standard Model..... In the early 1960s they theorized a missing Boson, later found and called (after one of its more well known theorizers) the "Higgs Boson."

The Nobel prize in physics was awarded for this breakthrough, though it took decades for the proof needed to verify it.

My point is a simple one. The more patient we are in science to look for physical causes first the better off we will be, since in that pursuit we won't be duped into magical and transcendental temptations too early.

I don't think it is at all absurd to try to find an explanation for all that we can. Indeed, that is why science is science, since it doesn't simply quit but rather chugs onwards..... and in so doing the most remarkable things can happen.

Often people forget that in the early 20th century there were many that felt that the secret of genetics would never be found and instead opted for Elan Vital..... thankfully, biologists and chemists such as Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkings, and James Watson were not deterred in looking for physical causations.

Indeed, they were influenced by Erwin Schrodinger's book, WHAT IS LIFE, which argued for looking for a physical medium by which information (genetic and otherwise) could be universally transmitted.

And, lo and behold, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953..... and it has radically changed our understanding of how life works.

So, again, let us pursue the Wilsonian idea of Consilient reductionism first..... and if that exhausts itself and there remains a "remainder"..... then we have something to build upon.

Or as Blaise Pascal said (or was attributed in saying), which I think goes to the heart of how science proceeds:

Yet, there is a downside in possessing a higher form of consciousness since it allows its owner to ponder all sorts of improbable events that will never actually happen.

We too often can get ensnared with our ideas, our fantasies, our projections and begin believing all sorts of nonsense. For a robust virtual simulator to work it must conjure up a plethora of scenarios that mix and match incongruent narratives.

In other words, for imagination to work it must be massively elastic. The glitch is that sometimes our simulations over take us and we get entrapped within their corridors.

To the degree that we can test our imaginings in the empirical world and acknowledge their successes and failures we are regarded as somewhat sane; to the degree that we cannot we may be viewed as somewhat insane. It is a thin line indeed that separates the two.

April 13, 2019

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma.

I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track.

Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."

I'm about a third of the way through. Which is far enough to have discovered the central theme. Harris writes:

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion -- and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

...Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self -- not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body behind the eyes, inside the head.

The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will.

And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.

...Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents.

Wow.

Now, I realize that some people would say "Yeah, makes sense, no big surprise" to the above scientifically- and experientially-persuasive truths.

But I spent decades as a devotee of a mystical philosophy that, like many others, taught that we humans have, or are, an eternal soul. The soul supposedly could return to God through meditation at the "eye center" -- that place behind the eyes and inside the head Harris, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, says doesn't house a self or soul.

So it sure seems like those who claim that this world is an illusion, with soul-realms being true reality, are the ones who have gotten it wrong.

There is no enduring soul or self to be liberated. As Harris says in his book, genuine spirituality is realizing this. Thus a belief in the existence of soul leads one farther away from the truth, not closer. This is basic Buddhism, yet even many Buddhists still harbor fantasies of living on after death as... something or other.

Other posts I wrote about my first reading of Harris' "Waking Up" are here, here, and here. I re-read the book in 2016 and wrote another post about it. I had some quibbles about how Harris views consciousness, but upon a closer reading of certain sections I was able to better grasp his viewpoint.

The past few days I've been reading "Waking Up" a third time. I switch highlighter colors with every reading. By now some pages are almost completely highlighted.

This book is my favorite in the spiritual but not religious genre. Harris is famously down on religion, yet decidedly up on understanding the nature of ourselves through Buddhist Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation that's aimed at dissolving the illusion that we are, or have, a self/soul.

Harris writes:

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind.

Buddha means "swakened one" -- and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self.

Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

...Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the West.

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

Beautiful.

What I love about this approach to spirituality is that it's solidly founded in modern neuroscience, which also says that our sense of being a "self" is almost certainly an illusion, so meditation needs to be aimed at realizing what we are not by paying close attention to what we actually are.

Namely, thoughts without a thinker; perceptions without a perceiver; emotions without an emoter; and so on.

Sam Harris writes:

The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self -- that there is no rider on the horse -- seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn't. What doesn't survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Harris uses this visual illusion as an analogy.

There appears to be a white box in the center of the figure. But, Harris says, "when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled."

Try blanking out all but one of the black figures with your hand. That makes it easier to see that what appears to be a white square actually is an absence, not a presence.

Just like the self, or soul. It appears to be there, but this is an illusion. Look for it, and it's nowhere to be found. If that feeling of nowhere'ness persists, congratulations. You're enlightened! Or, awake.

November 08, 2018

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human:

Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self?

To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB."

Brian: "there is nobody having an experience. There is just experience, which usually includes an experience of being, or having, a self." Rather than no-body having an experience, I would argue that there is a body having an experience. More precisely, I would argue that the conscious brain is having the experience. That also seems obvious and rational.

Harding: "All you are is consciousness and its contents." Brian: "his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self..." If I am consciousness, then consciousness certainly seems like a good candidate for the self. Proclaiming no-self would be tantamount to proclaim no-consciousness, or no-conscious-being.

l agree with JB. And I also still hold that we don't have a self as it is commonly understood. It all comes down to what is meant by self.

JB correctly observes that conscious beings have experiences. These experiences occur within a body. That could be a human body, a dog body, a whale body, a bird body, a bat body.

Most neuroscientists and philosophers interested in consciousness say that the borderline between a conscious and unconscious being is that there is something like to be a conscious being. Thomas Nagel kicked off this train of thought with his famous, "What is it like to be a bat?" question.

It sure seems like there is some answer to that question. It also seems like we will never know what the answer is, because only a bat can be a bat. Further, only a particular bat can know what it is like to be that particular bat.

Maybe all bats have the same sort of conscious experience. But I doubt it. I'm virtually 100% certain that dogs have different conscious experiences, having been close friends with several of them. And I'm even more certain, basically 100%, that we human have different conscious experiences.

And when it comes to myself, I know for a fact that moment by moment, minute by minute, day by day, year by year, I have different conscious experiences. Sometimes -- as in deep sleep or under anesthesia -- I don't have any conscious experiences at all.

So it seems clear that if consciousness produces, or is, what we mean by "self," this self is changeable. It isn't anything constant, unchanging, imperturbable. That's why I suggested in the title of this post that we call it "selfhood," which has a more flexible and dynamic connotation than "self."

Yet, many, if not most, people have a very different idea of what "self" means.

We often hear statements like, "I'm trying to find my true self," which implies that the self is like a buried treasure lurking somewhere under the obvious surface of consciousness. And religions look upon soul as being the spiritual or supernatural equivalent of a true self.

Meaning, soul is viewed as our eternal essence, while the body is viewed as temporary. (Christianity is ambiguous on this point, since bodily resurrection is part of Christian teaching; but ordinary Christians speak all of the time about soul and seem to believe that the soul survives bodily death.)

This certainly is the teaching of Hinduism and other Eastern forms of religion such as Sant Mat, since the soul (Atma) is supposed to be able to merge with God (Parmatma).

However, there is no evidence of a soul or Self -- with a capital "S" to indicate it's supposedly divine nature.

Further, there isn't even any evidence of an ordinary self, if "self" is construed to mean a permanent essence of ourselves that doesn't change. As JB indicated, the closest thing to something permanent in our psyche is consciousness, but this isn't what is generally considered to be a self.

The main reason we consider ourselves to be an enduring entity deserving of the title, "self," is memory. We have memories going back to early childhood. So when we think about ourselves, those memories are triggered, leading us to say things such as "It wasn't like me to have done something like that."

But if we had no memory of what we'd done in the past, we wouldn't be surprised at anything we did in the present, since that would simply be what we're doing now.

So along with JB, I do believe that each of us is a self. (Note: is, not has.) Again, though, I think selfhood might be a better term, since this means individuality. Every person is undeniably unique. We just lack a permanent self, or Self/Soul.

November 04, 2018

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away.

Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition.

My main problem with On Having No Head is the problem that I have with all books about personal spiritual breakthroughs or realizations. In the early days of my churchlessness, I was more interested in stories of how someone uncovered the Secret of the Universe.

As late as 2006 I was recommending books that now I'm much more skeptical about. Why? Because I've got a better understanding of how the human mind works -- the result of both my own experiences with meditation, and a lot of reading about modern neuroscience and psychology.

Here's the short version of what Harding experienced on a walk in the Himalayas, after he realized that he wasn't seeing his head (excerpt for a part of his nose).

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it as, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me," unstained by any observer. It's total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious.

OK. I have no doubt that Harding had a breathtaking experience. But here's the thing: like he said, his revelation was of the perfectly obvious. Yesterday I jotted down a note about something Sam Harris said in lesson 28 of the guided meditations in his Waking Up course.

You're the space in which everything appears. Everything is already happening. All you are is consciousness and its contents.

These three sentences are pretty much the gist of Harding's book. They indeed are perfectly obvious. Everything in the world, or indeed the entire universe, the Himalayas included, has to appear in our consciousness if we are to be aware of it. How else would we know anything?

But here's some facts about the human brain and mind (the mind is the brain in action, basically) that Harding doesn't address in On Having No Head, either because he wasn't aware of them, or chose not to mention them.

(1) The brain has no feeling. This allows surgeons to operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. So we aren't aware of what our hundred billion or so brain cells are doing in the same way we feel our muscles contracting, our fingers touching something, or our stomach digesting a heavy meal.

(2) In the quotation above, and elsewhere in his book, Harding speaks of a "vast emptiness" of consciousness. This may be how it feels to us, but that isn't reality. When Harding looked at the view of the Himalayas, his brain was busily piecing together data from his optic nerves, integrating it with past memories/experiences, and presenting him with what he calls a "superb scene." Visual perception isn't a passive mirroring of the world. It involves a lot of brain activity.

In the updated part of his book, Harding does speak about some neuroscientific truths: there is no evidence for an independent "self" within the brain/mind, nor does it appear that we humans possess free will, which seemingly would require the aforementioned self that doesn't exist.

Here's what Harding says in his Bringing the Story Up to Date section about his final stage of "The Eight Stages of the Headless Way." It's called (8) The Breakthrough.

This amounts to a profound declaration of intent. It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one's deepest desire is that all shall be as it is -- seeing that it all flows from one's true Nature, the Aware Space here.

How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer?

In a sense, nothing. It's not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there's anyone here to abandon. What else is there to do?

After all, one's initial in-seeing -- no matter how "brief" and "shallow" -- was already total self-surrender: everything here went: or rather, it was clear there's nothing here to go. It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity.

And for sure the faithful day-to-day seeing put in since then -- the seeing that already one is Nothing and Everything -- is a most valuable preparation for the discovery that at the deepest level one already wills Nothing and Everything.

Now, Harding goes on to talk about an unconditional surrender to God's will in which we welcome all that the world is bringing to us. But as noted above, his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self residing within our psyche, and there is no free will belonging to that nonexistent self.

Which is fully in accord with how Sam Harris understands the human brain/mind, which explains why Harris is a fan of Harding's book.

October 23, 2018

For many years, about 37, I was deeply attracted to mysticism. One of the reasons was that I loved how mystic teachings taught the self was an illusion and our sense of free will masked God's overarching control over all things, including human actions.

But gradually I realized the downsides of mysticism. There was no demonstrable evidence that God or anything supernatural existed. And my love of science eventually led me to embrace reality, rather than religion -- of which mysticism is an offshoot.

Now, though, I've come to a pleasing conclusion: modern science actually is more mystical than ancient mysticism, so scientific reality contains a big part of what I found so appealing in supernaturalism.

Indeed, it didn't take me long to find a highly highlighted copy on a bookshelf. So I'm going to give the new Amazon copy to my wife for sharing with members of an atheist/freethinkers discussion group she's organized here in Salem, Oregon.

I've found that because my views on science, the world, and reality keep evolving (good thing!), often I'll get fresh insights from a book I've enjoyed even if I read it fairly recently.

Such is happening already with The Great Illusion after re-reading only the Preface and the first chapter, Only God's Will. What struck me today is how modern science is able to dispel illusions (maya, if you like) in a much more powerful and convincing way than mysticism.

Paul Singh is a biochemist, mathematician, surgeon-physician, and a urogynecologist. He is a scholar of eastern and western intellectual traditions. He is a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the College of Medicine at the University of Science, Arts and Technology at Montserrat, British West Indies.

And here's some excerpts from his book about how us humans are deceived about the true nature of free will and the self:

My lifelong research has confirmed what modern science has shown -- that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions... Consciousness is any qualitative first-person experience. The feelings that you get when you pinch yourself, drink a glass of water, or feel bored are examples of consciousness.

Consciousness is certainly a fact (you who are reading this sentence are obviously conscious at this moment), but modern brain research suggests very strongly that consciousness cannot exist without a brain.

...Although it is correct to say that we have barely touched upon the perplexing complexity of the human brain, we have come far enough in our understanding that we can declare with confidence that these three entities -- free will, consciousness, and the self -- do not have any independent existence of their own independent of the human brain.

Their illusory existence is dependent upon the brain just like a mirage is dependent upon the brain and possesses no independent reality of its own.

Singh then talks about how evolution has given rise to our sense of individual identity, which includes the false notion of "souls" or "spirits" that supposedly enable our identity to live on even after the death of the physical body. Of course, religious and mystical beliefs also are products of the brain. So the brain generates the illusion that consciousness can exist without the brain.

It's impossible to escape from this hall of mirrors by any means other than modern science. Singh writes:

First, the beliefs, that have been found to be illusions by science, are essential for human survival. Since we cannot think any other way than to believe that we are, somehow, independent of our bodies, such a belief must have played an important role in our evolutionary past.

We don't know where the "I" or "self" resides, but we all feel there is such a self. That is what led philosophers for thousands of years to think there is a "ghost in the machine." Ancient Hindus wrote thousands of treatises on this subject and they are still writing them today. But science has demonstrated that these philosophers and religious thinkers were all wrong.

What scientists discover through the scientific method is often counter-intuitive. In the absence of science, we often draw unwarranted conclusions, based on simple observations, frequently mixing our emotions with our observations... The brain determines subjective experience in exactly the same way it determines all other bodily functions.

...We like to think of ourselves as being something other than our bodies, but actually, as modern science has shown, we are our bodies, You are your body; you wouldn't be you without your body wired together with your brain. Without your brain, you wouldn't be you.

Everything about you as a person can be explained by what goes on in your brain. Who you are and what you are like, all of your emotions and every one of your ideas, how you think and what you think about, and our own personal story, come from your brain. You would have no idea of your own existence without your brain.

The body you will leave behind when you die will carry your name, because it was your body, and not someone else's. The very possibility of imagining that you can float free of your body is conceivable only because it is your brain that thinks these things.

...Your inner self, your soul, and the god you worship are nothing else but your own brain interconnected with the rest of your body.

So what's the way out of this brain maze, which sometimes leads us to a correct understanding of reality, yet also leads us astray when it comes to believing in God, soul, spirit, free will, life after death, and the nature of consciousness? Science!

The brain doesn't have the job of "speaking up" and revealing what it does, and the conscious awareness that the brain does produce cannot automatically seem organic or even physical. Only through studying the brain scientifically can we explain why we aren't normally alerted to innumerable details about what our brains are doing as we go about living our lives.

In a way, projecting what is sensed and thought into an alternative sort of reality was something that the human brain had to do as intelligence grew.

...Because science arrived late to the human scene, non-scientific explanations had plenty of time to get entrenched in so many stories that humans have been telling themselves, and the concepts in these stories got embedded in the languages we all learn to speak as children,

...For people, "mind" has most of the same meanings that "spirit' had millennia ago, and most people today expect mind to share in the same destiny as spirit.

But what seems like undeniable common sense, confirmed by our intuitions and assumed by the ordinary words we speak, is really just a built-up web of imaginative notions that developed over the long course of ordinary human events, hardened by regular use as people lived out their mundane paths in life.

Those notions and fabulous stories conveying them have made many people feel extremely special, perhaps so special that it can seem as if the whole of creation is really about them.

Your brain is quite real. What the brain is busily doing in so many special ways must be largely hidden from awareness. Our innate curiosity can raise good questions about what is going on. After that, however, only science can responsibly investigate what the brain actually does and how it accomplishes all the special things it can do.

The true story of the human brain is more amazing than anything imagined before.

Nicely said, Dr. Singh.

What Singh talks about in his book isn't all that different from what I've read in many other books about neuroscience, the illusion of free will, and how consciousness arises in the brain.

But reading the excerpts I've shared led to a more solid realization in my own brain that all of mysticism, all of meditation, all of religion, all of everything, is the product of nerve cells firing in the marvelously complex cranium of us Homo sapiens.

Our clear understanding of reality, along with the illusions that confuse us -- all this arises from a single source: the human brain. There is no way a brain can understand itself, since most of what transpires in the brain occurs outside of conscious awareness.

So modern science is the only way to reveal the secrets that lie hidden within us. Not mysticism, because mystics are subject to the same illusions regarding free will, consciousness, and the self that everyone else is. Yes, meditation can result in different brain states.

But so can drugs, extreme sports, a walk under the night sky, loving someone deeply, and so much else. There's no way out of the maze of the brain except through the collaboration of many brains working together to cut through illusion and reveal reality.

October 18, 2018

I'm pleased to share another email message from JB, a frequent commenter on this blog who has an outstanding ability to write cogently about profound topics.

I was tempted to say "philosophical topics," but as you will read below, JB's thoughts about consciousness really have little to do with philosophy -- at least, as most people regard this field. The ancient Greeks considered philosophy (literally, love of wisdom) to be a way of life, not an academic exercise.

So in that sense, what JB writes about is indeed philosophical, since there is nothing more intimately connected with life than our consciousness. No consciousness, no life.

Enjoy.

Hi Brian,

I noticed that you haven't taken part in much of the discussion about volition. On a separate but related topic, I notice that there is much talk about the term "I" supposedly representing something nonexistent.

Years ago I spent some time examining this term and its usage and came to the conclusion that it does represent something real, at least as real as anything else in an existence where everything is temporary, relative, and conditional. Arriving at this conclusion seems logical but please correct me if there is something deficient with this use of logic.

I came to understand that the term "I" simply represents consciousness itself, not even a conscious entity per se, but consciousness itself.

It should be noted at the outset that the assertion "I am consciousness" is not a spiritual or religious claim. I do not contend that consciousness is immaterial, will survive death, or can exist in any way apart from the brain.

We use the term "I" and, rather than simply being a conventional artifact, it denotes a function.

Thus, it helps to examine and isolate the referent of this signifier. At first blush, one might conflate the term "I" with the totality of each individual being or an entity, but this would be a mistake. The symbol "I" ultimately refers to the seat of subjectivity, the seat of experience. "I" am the receiver-of-experience, the experiencer, or more to the point—experience itself. The seat of subjectivity is consciousness.

Experience necessarily entails consciousness.

There is no experience without consciousness, no consciousness without experience. They are at minimum coexisting and inextricable, if not identical (I presume the latter out of parsimony). Therefore, consciousness, subjectivity, and experience are all interchangeable terms and essentially synonymous.

Why do I contend that consciousness itself is the referent of the "I" signifier?

I take the radical empirical and phenomenological route to arrive at this answer. I have had anesthesia twice in my life and I utterly disappeared during that time. I also entirely vanish each night in deep, dreamless sleep. I reemerge in dreams because a form of consciousness (dream-consciousness) emerges.

The term "I" does not refer to one's body (save their brain) because one could have their arms and legs amputated and "I" would remain intact. "I" have nothing to do with almost all of my physiological processes. My heart circulates blood, food is digested, my hair grows—all without "I".

"I" is, quantitatively speaking, an infinitesimally small aspect of this organism. "I" is also a mere fragment of my mental processes.

But qualitatively speaking, "I" is vital.

The very term "quality" itself necessarily implies experience/consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no experience. Without experience, there is subjective nonexistence. While consciousness may be a quantitative minority in terms of the totality of mental activities, it is absolutely imperative for experience and therefore, the awareness of existence. Experiential existence is entirely contingent upon consciousness.

Ask yourself this question: Do I have consciousness or am I conscious? It may seem like variations on the same question, but it isn't.

Having consciousness requires an entity that possesses consciousness, the corollary being that it could functionally exist in the absence of this capacity. If "I" have consciousness, "I" must be both prior to consciousness and able to be detached from consciousness and still functionally exist.

This doesn't hold up either under the phenomenological evidence. "I" doesn't appear without consciousness or apart from consciousness, so there is no basis for the argument that "I" is referring to anything other than consciousness. "I" doesn't have consciousness; "I" is conscious. "I" is consciousness itself.

Another example: When one says, "I feel nauseated", one could just as well say "the experience of nausea is happening." The differences are due to grammatical convention. The term "I" denotes something that is never divorced from experience. Consciousness is the only function that can never be divorced from experience. To be conscious is to be experiencing.

Consciousness is experience. Consciousness/experience and "I" utterly disappears with a blow to the head, with deep sleep, with anesthesia, and will permanently disappear with death. Death is the "deep sleep" from which one never reemerges.

Now, what about those that claim that "I" cannot refer to anything because there is no self? Proponents of this belief claim that there must be no self because there is no self that can be found. Coincidentally, or not, consciousness is also something that cannot be found. Consciousness is self-disclosing but cannot be directly apprehended by itself.

The author Douglas Harding's so-called awakening experience involved the perception of having "no head." The "no head" experience is strikingly analogous to the seemingly earth-shattering experience of "anatman," wherein the experience leaves one with the sense that they, and everyone else, have "no self."

As Walter Truett Anderson wrote, "You know you have a head, of course, but you do not have a head for yourself, in your own field of vision." Likewise, I would contend that you have a self of course, but you do not have a self for yourself. Just as one's head can never see itself and is sensed as either nonexistent or a "vast emptiness," people go looking for the self and find nothing.

They have concluded that the self is either nonexistent or is a vast emptiness/nothingness (read: Nagarjuna).

Just as one cannot directly see their head, one likewise cannot directly see their self, as the self is the "seeing" (is consciousness itself). This inability to directly apprehend consciousness has led some in the academic community to conclude that it too is not existent, but a rather persistent illusion (more on that below).

But to conclude that consciousness and the self are illusory and ultimately nonexistent would be as silly as believing that you literally have no head.

The moral of the story is: just because you cannot sense the self doesn't necessarily imply that there is no self, any more than not being able to see your head means that you have no head. If it is true, as Francis of Assisi said, that "what you are looking for is that which is looking," then of course it will never see itself.

Alan Watts said, "You don’t know yourself, because you never can. [Yourself is] never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself."

Some theoreticians have, at one time or another, attempted to construct an argument postulating that consciousness is an illusion (read: Blackmore, Dennett, et al.). Most have retreated from this position due to its untenability, as the argument quickly unravels itself when subjected to scrutiny.

If it is the interaction of material structures that create the illusion of consciousness (and that consciousness is, in fact, non-existent), then it is by and through a non-existent faculty that we have come to discover and study these very structures that are said to be generating the illusion. Therefore, it would follow that these material structures (particles, molecules, neuro-chemicals, the brain) are also non-existent if they were apprehended via a non-existent function.

Simply out, if consciousness is non-existent, then all information/experience gleaned by and through said non-existent phenomenon is, by logical necessity, also non-existent.

If consciousness does not exist, then the content of consciousness (sensory experience, for instance) must not exist. Thus, all sensory phenomena presumably experienced by and through consciousness (including any and all features of the material world) would not, in fact, exist. The universe does not exist. The earth does not exist. You and I don't exist. Neither do these theoreticians, their books or any of the ideas contained within these books.

If consciousness does not exist, then all mental phenomena -- thought, observation, analyzation, reason, logic, etc. do not exist, including the very thought that consciousness doesn't exist. The notion of something supposedly without existence making an assertion regarding the existence of anything, especially itself, would be the zenith of irony.

Consciousness is self-disclosing and yet thoroughly and unequivocally indemonstrable. Ironically, that which makes all knowledge and experience possible can itself only be known or experienced "indirectly." It can never be a direct object of itself.

And furthermore, while consciousness can never become its own object, the existence of consciousness in any experience is the only thing that can be known with certainly due to its self-disclosing and self-validating nature.

All of reality may be a "holographic projection" or a simulation, yet this wouldn't alter the fact there is consciousness of the projection. With the consciousness of reality or the consciousness of an illusion, consciousnes is the common denominator. While all of the objects of consciousness may in fact just be illusions, if one is conscious of these appearances, one can know that consciousness itself exists and is therefore not an illusion.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Let me know what you think if you have the time.

Here's what I emailed back to JB. His responses are shown in italics.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. The rest isn’t something I disagree with. I just need to ponder it more. Mostly I’m referring to the notion that if consciousness doesn’t exist, then nothing else does either. Maybe you’re right. It’s just a subtle, slippery argument.

Are you referring to this: "Experiential existence is entirely contingent upon consciousness." No, I certainly don't think that whatever exists is dependent upon consciousness for its existence. I just mean that the experiential component of life depends on being conscious. If we existed but were unconscious (like zombies), we wouldn't experience anything at all. It would be a black out - unconsciousness.

I don’t think you’re saying that before consciousness existed in the universe, there wasn’t a universe. That’s a different issue. At least, maybe it is. Things exist even if no conscious being is aware of them, I’m quite confident of that. What you’re getting at seems to be how confident we humans can be about our take on the world if our consciousness is an illusion.

The way I see it, a masterful alien programmer seemingly could produce a sense of consciousness in the actors within the simulation we might be in. I don’t see how this would make a difference in the reality of the simulation. It would still exist even if, as is the case with human simulations/computer games, the actors had no consciousness.

I'm not sure because, as I've said, I equate consciousness with experience. In my understanding, one necessarily implies the other. Can a character in a computer game actually internally experience that world? Each character would be having its own internal felt-experience, unknown to any of the other characters who would be having their own?

I sort of agree that our sense of being conscious is its own validation.

But as noted in a previous post, and you seem to agree with this, what we’re talking about is “consciousness of” things, not consciousness as an independent entity. My question just is about the need for consciousness as a validation of what is real. I see the possibility of an advanced computer/robot being able to determine what exists in the world through its simulated senses (vision, touch, etc), even though it lacks consciousness.

I think such a robot could certainly compile data through simulated senses, but it would be a strain for me to submit to the notion that such objective data would be subjectively experienced. You could program the robot so that it was as if it experienced, but I don't think it would. Maybe it's a question of the degree of advancement needed to reach that level of complexity.

October 17, 2018

In regard to the question I asked in the title of this post, I'd say "No." For one thing, how could someone know that they are conscious without an extra something-or-other besides supposedly pure consciousness?

Let's be clear: Sam Harris considers that the brain produces consciousness. He doesn't show any sign of believing in a transcendent non-physical consciousness (like soul or spirit) which exists apart from the brain. So I have no problem with this aspect of Harris' view of consciousness.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels.

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken. It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses.

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace."

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

A letter in the September 22, 2018 issue of New Scientist rings true to me.

From Ed SubitzkyNew York, US

I much enjoy the ongoing discussion of consciousness in your pages (for exampled, Letters, 21 July). It seems to me that one cannot just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something, whether it is the scent of a rose, the internal feeling of being happy or sad, or the words you are reading now.

Consciousness, whatever it is, must have content in order to exist. Substituting the phrase "consciousness" with the phrase "consciousness of" makes the entire issue seem more tractable.

Good point. This still leaves open the possibility that consciousness is an actual thing, distinct from what consciousness is aware of.

However, it also opens the door to consciousness being awareness of something, not a self-existent entity. It's sort of like saying that there is something termed "life" that is separate from every living thing.

What would this "life" be like? Similarly, what would consciousness absent being conscious of something be like? Even if someone is only aware that they are conscious, that awareness is something, not pure consciousness devoid of any conscious content.

So it isn't all that crazy to say that consciousness doesn't exist in and of itself. Only consciousness of some content exists.